Estonia 1998: Off to Lithuania

From the archives: It turns out that I was blogging long before anyone had ever heard the term “blog.” Twenty years ago I was an exchange student in Estonia. While studying at the University of Tartu, I created an online travelogue to keep my family and friends apprised of my experiences. Both my life and the nation of Estonia have changed a lot the two decades since. This reprise is providing me with a glimpse at who I was back then and the excuse to learn more about more recent developments in my temporary home, even if some of the opinions that I expressed back then may make me a little bit uncomfortable today. It is interesting to see how people grow and change.

April 13-19, 1998

This week I took a little break from Estonia and went to Kaunas, Lithuania to attend an international conference on human rights. It was a good opportunity to find out a lot about a subject that I have always been woefully uninformed on and a chance to meet some wonderful new people in a simply gorgeous city. Kaunas is really a beautiful place and if you ever get the chance to go, definitely take it. A fun, fun week.

13 April 1998
Monday

I’m pretty exhausted right now, so just a short entry. At International Human Rights class today, I confirmed the fact that I will be going to Lithuania for the conference on Thursday and Friday. It is shaping up to be a very interesting time and I think that I will get a lot out of it. The Austrian ministry of justice is operating the conference and it should give me the opportunity to meet some people that I would not normally have the chance to encounter.

In the evening we had our typical X-Files night followed by the incredible Robin Williams, Robert DeNiro film Awakenings. What an absolutely mind blowing experience. The mysteries of the human mind are immense and beyond comprehension. It takes a movie like that to remind us of how fragile the whole thing really is.

14 April 1998
Tuesday

I can’t believe that by this tomorrow I will be Kaunas. I am really looking forward to this trip. I have been in Estonia for quite some time now and it will be quite nice to get into another country and see something that is not Estonia for a change. There is nothing wrong with Estonia but the simple fact is that everyone needs a change of pace every once in a while. It will be kind of strange, however, being in a country again where I don’t speak a word of the language. 

After my time in Estonia I have been getting accustomed to the idea of being able to say anything I want to most anyone I meet on the street and not having to worry about which language to say it in, much like the system we have in the States only on a smaller scale. I did ask Rugile from Estonian class for a few basic words in Lithuanian. Despite the fact that I will not have a chance to actually communicate in Lithuanian, I firmly believe that anyone who visits a country for more than twenty-four hours has no excuse for not at lest knowing (and using) the words “please”, “thank you”, “hello” and “goodbye”.

Tomorrow morning Sue and I and Anneli will be on our way to Kaunas. The bus leaves at 7:00, so I’d best get some sleep…

15 April 1998
Wednesday

Back in Lithuania. What a great feeling. This morning I left Tartu at 7:00 with Sue and Anneli for our conference in Kaunas. It was a good bus ride and we had no serious problems except being one seat short in the Tartu-Riga microbus.

In Riga we stopped for lunch at a wonderful place called Nuu Jork (much the same thing as Manhattan in Tartu), where I had a real steak for the first time in a long time and later we went up the steeple of St. Peter’s Cathedral for a good view of the old town.

A few hours later we arrived here in Kaunas where we were met by a pair of wonderful Lithuanians, Karolina and Kestas. It was a great evening while they showed us around and took us to pizza. I had forgotten the emotional difference between Estonians and Lithuanians. In many ways it reminds me of home. Not to short Estonians at all, but I really like Lithuanians. I haven’t been around such open and outgoing people in a long, long time.

16-18 April 1998
Thursday through Saturday

The conference was much too busy and I was much too tired every night to write in my journal. Here is a summary:

The conference was simply incredible. The first day we sat in a big conference room with a couple of hundred Lithuanian law students, lawyers, police officers and members of the judiciary. At the beginning we really just went over things that we had already covered in our Tartu human rights class, but it was very enlightening to look at these issues from a different point of view. The issues covered in some ways didn’t really touch me as I am not a European citizen (the conference looked at things from the point of view of the European Commission on Human Rights) but the basic concepts will transfer and it is eye opening to view how other countries view basic freedoms and rights. 

As an American and someone from a common law country sometimes my opinions and experiences were at direct loggerheads with the European civil law approach. There are definite differences in the way of looking at things but these two days really convinced me that the end result is about the same. However, at the same time I can’t imagine giving up the absolutist approach to freedom and rights guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States for the legalistic regulatory approach favored by the Europeans.

We got to meet several wonderful people, including members of the Austrian Ministry of Justice. It is an incredibly humbling opportunity to discuss human rights and legal systems to a woman who is involved currently in the establishment of the permanent U.N. Criminal Court. Brings new meaning to the concept of “field trip”.

We also got to spend a lot of time with the other international delegation of students from Latvia. One of them even rode home with us on the bus and spend the better part of her Saturday showing Sue and I around Riga. It makes a city so much more comfortable when a local acts as host and tour guide. Beats the best Lonely Planet-esque guidebook any day. We got to see things that no tourist would ever discover on their own. It was late Saturday when we rolled into Tartu Saturday night, exhausted but incredibly satisfied.